To his credit, he does allow--in cowardly CYA weatherman fashion--that Trump's chances are greater than 0%!

Silver's now on to explain how Trump can't win the general election because he's unpopular with voters. If he had any shame, he'd concede that his November assurances that Trump was a long shot at best for the GOP nod is now very much the contrarian position not only based on polling data--which he discounted in favor of prediction markets--but also based on... prediction markets.

Yes, betting against ¡Jabe! offers a potential 20% annual return (if purchased now and cashed out in mid-July when the Republican national convention occurs), though the market takes 5% of a participant's withdrawals.

Bizarrely, Silver asserts that while Trump's poll numbers are high, electoral participation by his supporters will not be correspondingly impressive.

Googling images for "[candidate] rally crowd" makes it abundantly clear that Trump's rally crowd advantage dwarfs even his lead in the polls, and he's holding several of these rallies per week, sometimes even per day. The presumption that rally attendance inversely correlates with electoral participation is a curious one to say the least. "We'll drive an hour and then wait in line outside in the bitter cold to see, from the nosebleed section, a tiny figure on the dais that the jumbotron reveals is in fact Trump, but we're not swinging by the polling location at the church four blocks down the road after work to vote for him in our state's primary!"

As pleasantly surprising as it is to be able to crush the DJIA by betting against ¡Jabe! or against Chris Christie (who was at 7% when I bought), Marco Rubio's purportedly strong showing is the one I find most puzzling. He's been relentlessly promoted by the establishment, and it's safe to presume that the residual in those 5:1 odds comes from the assumption that said establishment will do something untoward to thwart the will of the Republican electorate and destroy the spirit of the nominating process by sneaking him in by hook or crook (or brokered convention) if Trump is chosen by actual primary voters, but Rubio's polling numbers have been--and continue to be--terrible. The most recent Reuters/Ipsos five daily national tracking poll among likely Republican primary voters:

While we're doing our best to wreck desperately hoped for self-fulfilling prophecies media narratives, let's tackle the one about Trump not being popular among young people.

Republican partisan affiliation is positively correlated with age, and consequently Republicans aren't popular among young people generally, but Trump comfortably beats the rest of the bunch. Again, the most recent five day national tracking poll results for those aged 18-34 among Republicans (all Republicans, as sample sizes for likely GOP voters in the age range are too small to be reliable):

There is a long paper trail and it's going to reveal a lot of people to be off one way or the other. While I'd like to think that matters, pundits rarely suffer for any incorrect predictions they make. To the contrary, they often make a killing getting everything spectacularly wrong.